Prologue

      A COLD, GUSTY wind swept up from the Celtic Sea, whistling and shrieking in the rocks and ruins as Lindsey Hargreaves jumped over a puddle in the muddy, rutted lane. She didn’t care about the weather. She was happy to be out of her car. She would never get used to Irish roads, and this one was worse than most—if one could call it a road. It curved up from the tiny village of Declan’s Cross, hugging sea cliffs, twisting through fields of grazing sheep and finally dead-ending at a stone wall tucked between two small hills at the tip of what locals called Shepherd Head.

      Her rented Mini barely fit into the small hollow, but she was confident it wouldn’t be spotted from the water or farther down the lane.

      That was good. She didn’t want anyone to see her.

      She noticed a holly tree poking up from the November-browned hedges, rushes and ferns that grew along the stone wall. Its waxen, evergreen leaves glistened with raindrops from an earlier shower.

      Wasn’t holly supposed to bring good luck?

      “I hope so,” she whispered.

      A muddy trail led up through wind-stunted trees to a rock ledge with a precipitous drop to the cobble-and-boulder coastline. Lindsey had never been up there and couldn’t see the ledge from the lane, but she had seen it from the water.

      And the crosses.

      She’d seen them, too. Three stone Celtic crosses rising from golden-copper grass on the small hill at the tip of the headland. She looked up at them now, standing tall against the gray clouds of the damp, gloomy November afternoon. They marked old graves next to the ruin of a small church on the other side of the stone wall. She’d read there’d been a church dedicated to Saint Declan on this spot for more than a thousand years.

      Whose graves, Lindsey wondered, were up there on the hill? She tried to imagine the rough, simple life the last residents of this place must have endured. Had they died in the horrible mid-nineteenth century Irish famine? Had they joined the mass emigration to other parts of the world? America, Canada, Australia?

      What would she have done in their position?

      Survived, she thought.

      Her natural enthusiasm and optimism, coupled with her instinct for survival, would see her through what she had to do out here.

      She tightened her sweater around her. She hadn’t brought a jacket or even a raincoat. She wore too-tight jeans, the same dark gray as her sweater, and black boots more suited to the Dublin streets where she’d spent the past two days than out here on the south Irish coast. An Hermès scarf with its cheerful mix of reds, blues and purples added a splash of color to her outfit. It was a birthday gift from her father, his first birthday